Kiribati says NZ, Aust not doing enough

A Kiribati leader who fears her country will be lost to rising
sea says New Zealand and Australia are not doing enough to help the
climate change refugees of Kiribati.

Tessie Lambourne, the Foreign Secretary of the former Gilbert
Islands in Micronesia, who has flown to the Copenhagen climate
change negotiations with President Anote Tong, says the Kiribati
government wants New Zealand and Australia to provide its people
with a safe haven from the rising sea.

In the meantime, they want the governments to help pay for
training islanders so they arrive in their new homes with
skills.

"There is a serious threat to our very own existence as a people
and as a nation," she says.

"People are trying to grapple with this thought. Are we really
going to lose our home? And where are we going to live? Or our
children or children's children? Where are they going to live? And
how are they going to survive?

"We do not want to relocate as environmental refugees," she
says.

"We want to be able to relocate on merit and with dignity."

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This could be done by upskilling people so they could meet
international labour standards and fill in labour gaps in other
countries.

Kiribati has about 100,000 people living in huts and basic
houses on dozens of low lying coral atolls north of Samoa - which
the country fears will be covered by sea water within 50 years.

"One island, actually a whole village has been relocated. The
sea has crept into their village and so they had to move,"
Lambourne says.

Professor Jonathan Boston, of the Institute of Policy Studies at
Victoria University, told the ABC that neither the New Zealand nor
Australian governments had clear policies on climate change
refugees.

"Neither government to my knowledge have undertaken any serious
attempt to introduce this particular issue to the public,
specifying other the potential implications for New Zealand and
Australia in terms of the numbers of climate change refugees from
the South Pacific or in terms of the additional assistance that New
Zealand and Australia will need to provide to assist small island
states," he says.

"The issue really hasn't been raised by the two governments ...
nor has it really been put adequately on the agenda by the academic
communities or the non-governmental organisations."

Wellington photographer Tony Whincup, who has been photographing
evidence of climate change on the islands for 30 years, said the
coral atolls were two metres high at the highest point.

"Kiribati is one of those places where whatever, whichever way
climate change goes - rising sea level, changes in temperature,
changes in weather patterns, of violent storms - they're hit every
which way," Whincup says.

He describes the impacts as heartbreaking, considering there is
virtually no carbon footprint or pollution of the world from
Kiribati, and the country is being destroyed by other affluent
nations many thousands of kilometres away.